City Council aide charged with theft

A North­east wo­man iden­ti­fied by au­thor­it­ies as a sec­ret­ary em­ployed by Phil­adelphia City Coun­cil was ar­res­ted Ju­ly 17 for al­legedly steal­ing money from an eld­erly wo­man who had been placed in her care.

Nancy Gonza­lez, 51, is charged with deal­ing in pro­ceeds of un­law­ful activ­it­ies, mul­tiple counts of theft, tam­per­ing with re­cords, un­sworn falsi­fic­a­tion, ac­cess device fraud and reck­less en­dan­ger­ment. She is sched­uled for a pre­lim­in­ary hear­ing on Sept. 10 and is free on $5,000 un­se­cured bail.

The dis­trict at­tor­ney’s of­fice provided few de­tails of the case. But ac­cord­ing to a re­port pub­lished by the Daily News, Gonza­lez, a Tor­res­dale res­id­ent, stole nearly $25,000 in So­cial Se­cur­ity checks from an 88-year-old wo­man who was liv­ing in a run-down, dirty Kens­ing­ton house with no heat, run­ning wa­ter, stove or re­fri­ger­at­or.

Gonza­lez, who worked for Coun­cil as a whole and not any in­di­vidu­al Coun­cil mem­ber, was the vic­tim’s des­ig­nated So­cial Se­cur­ity rep­res­ent­at­ive pay­ee. Gonza­lez was to re­ceive the vic­tim’s be­ne­fit checks and use the in­come to pay the vic­tim’s bills and to care for her.

Gonza­lez was once mar­ried to the vic­tim’s neph­ew and be­came the older wo­man’s pay­ee in 2005, the news­pa­per re­por­ted. ••